For some of you, thinking
of Texas might conjure images of oil wells and refineries, a place laden
with environmental no-no’s. But that’s unfair, since the Lone
Star State has more nature tourism acres than the Great Smoky Mountain
National Park and the Rocky Mountain National Park combined. Even so,
when I first learned about a green-thumb, Houston-based company called
MMLJ that’s created a machine that uses nonpolluting baking soda
to remove bottom paint, I was caught off guard. But upon hearing that
this technique is also supposedly more cost-effective in the long run,
is less time-consuming than traditional stripping methods, and eases waste-disposal
problems, I had to know more.

In fact, baking soda
has long been recognized for its exceptional cleaning abilities beyond
household applications. It was used to restore the Statue of Liberty in
the 1980’s, chosen for its ability to clean without destroying the
integrity of the statue’s surface. In the early 1990’s, when
Ford recalled a number of F-150 pick-ups, citing “premature failure
of paint coatings,” MMLJ offered sodablasting as a time- and labor-saving
alternative to the established hand-sanding and chemical-stripping methods.
Later the city of Chicago, which owns approximately 30 of the company’s
machines, recognized sodablasting as a time-saving, nondestructive, and
eco-friendly way to remove graffiti from buildings.

MMLJ uses a granulated
baking soda formula (yes, the same kind used around your house and in
your food) to remove antifouling paint. The process involves putting the
soda (a.k.a. sodium bicarbonate), a clean, pure substance that’s
FDA- and USDA-approved, into a container called a SodaBlaster, where it’s
pressurized and then shot at the hull under high pressure. The result
is a nontoxic, environmentally friendly way to clean your boat’s
hull bottom that won’t damage gelcoat and represents a marked departure
from conventional methods like chemical strippers and sanding.

“So let me get
this straight,” I said, dumbfounded, after listening to Benny LeCompte,
vice president of operations and general manager of MMLJ. “You’re
telling me I can clean and remove paint from my boat’s hull with
the same stuff I clean my teeth with? The same stuff I keep in the ‘fridge?”

“I know,”
he replied, “it almost sounds too good to be true, but it’s
not.”

Until recently, sodium
bicarbonate was used on rare occasions—if at all—to remove antifouling
paint. LeCompte says that for many years MMLJ was so focused on sodablasting
in other industries that the marine businesses weren’t “there
for them.” And, funny enough, Bill Connelly of StripCo, a Dallas-based
company that uses the process and distributes SodaBlasters, adds, “blasting
boat bottoms may be sodablast’s best and highest use. The next-best
alternative [of chemical strippers and sanding] is so inferior in comparison,
it doesn’t even come close.”